And now for something completely different

One of my clients has asked me to do some investigative work for them in relation to Linux running on a Vortex86-6071LV (a PC/104 format PC which is 386 PC on a board that’s around 6" x 4" x 1/2").

Should be fun.

The machine in question is actually a VOX-064-TS thin frame PC with a touch screen which is pretty cool. The ‘disk’ is a 32mb solid state device and it’s kinda weird to see this tiny PC boot up via the usual AMI BIOS screens and then into Linux in around 10 seconds from this super fast disk (I want solid state disks for my dev box! to hell with the expense ;) )

The PC has all the usual connections but the plugs are all ‘mini-me’ versions of what you’d expect. So the first thing I did this morning was order some adapters so that I can stick a floppy drive on it and connect an external USB hard disk. Right now I’m ever so slightly nervous of screwing up the disk image and having no way of rebuilding the box…

The current piece of work has three main stages; first I need to get the onboard graphics card working properly in graphics mode. Then I need to get a web browser on board and finally I need to get the touch screen working. Should be fun. Today was mostly spent re-awakening my unix skills and downloading a Linux distro and tool chain so that I can rebuild the kernel if/when I need to.